This vlog is about the beginning of presentations and how using questions can get your audience on board straight away.

The beginning of presentations – how to use questions

Here’s the summary if you don’t have the opportunity to watch the video.

Carefully placing your questions

Using questions in a talk and a presentation is such a good technique at every stage of your presentation. Rhetorical questions, sometimes direct questions that are really carefully placed and peppered throughout your talk, can be:

• fantastic ways of exciting curiosity,
• getting lots of participation,
• and also getting people to really be involved and to be thinking about what you’re saying.

Questions as a way of opening up your presentation are a superb hook. They give your talk a huge impact, and gets your audience on board straight away.

So this is why questions really work.

Rhetorical questions

When we ask a question, and in a presentation, this will almost certainly be a rhetorical one rather than a direct one. When we ask that rhetorical question, and we pause (do remember to pause), then what we are asking our audience to do is to start to generate some sort of answer.

So that means from the very get go, you’ve got your audience thinking about what you want to say and what you’re going on to say.

So they are engaged and they are also participating, but they’re also curious, which is a word you’ve heard me say an awful lot if you’ve heard me talk about hooks!

So think about those questions, and you can phrase them in different ways. It could be:

• how many?
• I bet, if I asked how many?
• did you know that?
• I’m sure that some of you

and so on and so forth.

So there’s lots of nice ways of introducing those questions.

Direct questions

Now just a word on direct questions as an opener. If you ask a direct question and by that, I mean, a question where you are expecting and demanding an actual physical answer from your audience, you will get immediate participation. But you run a very real risk of either nobody answering, so it all falls very, very flat. And remember, this is your opening gambit.

Or you get somebody who answers with a really weird answer. And your think

‘Where did that come from?’ Or even, and this is slightly worse, that they answer, and it’s the wrong answer for your talk, for where you’re expecting to direct them on your talk, and then you’re sort of having to be on the back foot dealing with that before you’ve even got started.

So it can be problematic. And you might choose not to do that so that you’ve got a very clear impacting opening, that you’ve got absolute control over as you go into the rest of your talk.

Now the time when the direct question often works is if it’s a more intimate setting, so usually a smaller audience and one that you know really, really well. Perhaps you’ve got personal relationships with that particular group of people, or indeed it could be in a training scenario where you’re setting the expectation and the scene that this this question is there.

Use questions

But generally speaking, I advise you go for non direct questions, but definitely do consider using questions at the beginning of presentations because they are awesome.

If you’d like to know about ending your presentations with impact, this video explains how.

Have a go and let me know how you get on. And of course, if you need any help, please get in touch.